55 traits and the one she never thought to write
 
You may have a list somewhere. A page in a notebook, a note in your phone, a file you have not opened in months. It describes the person you are waiting for. Tonight, pull it out. Count how many items describe what he looks like. Then count how many describe how you feel when he is in the room.
Elena Murzello wrote that list at 21. Fifty-five traits. Dark denim jeans. Straight teeth. Between 5’11” and 6’3”. Within a month, she met someone who matched. They lasted 10 years. Then he went to a bachelor party in Las Vegas, met a woman, and ended it the next weekend. Three months later he was engaged. Six months later, married. He moved into the apartment they had shared.
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What happened after
 
She did not throw the list away. She went into what she later called a hibernation. She enrolled in grad school. She finished an MBA at the University of British Columbia. And she sat with a question that would not leave her alone: how did the list fail?
It did not fail. It answered exactly what she asked. She had asked for a surface. Dark jeans. A height range. A smile she could picture. The list delivered a person who looked like the answer. Ten years later, the answer walked out.
When she rewrote the list, she changed the question.
The second list was not about what he looked like. It was about what she needed to feel. Whether he was passionate about his own work. Whether he had a close group of friends. Whether he stayed near his family. Whether he respected what she believed without needing to share it.
In an interview years later, she named the trait that was missing from all 55. Five words: I want the person to love me. It had never made the list. She had written down his height, his jeans, his teeth. She never wrote down that he should love her. At 21, she did not know that was something you had to ask for.
She published the book “The Love List” in 2013 and appeared on the Tamron Hall Show, NBC News, and Good Morning Washington. The story traveled not because the list worked. It traveled because the list worked, and that was not enough.
What this story is for.
If you wrote a list, pull it out tonight. Count how many items describe a person and how many describe a feeling. If the list is all person and no feeling, it will be filled. It may not hold.
She did not change what she wanted. She changed the question she put at the top of the page.
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Where it goes wrong
 
She writes a list about the package, not the experience.
Height. Profession. Neighborhood. She can picture the person but not the Tuesday night. The list delivers someone who looks correct and feels like a stranger within a year.
She audits every date against the list.
The first dinner becomes a checklist. She runs every sentence through 55 items. The person across the table feels it. He does not know what the list says, but he knows he is being scored.
She never updates it.
The list she wrote at 21 is not the list she needs at 34. Her life changed. Her values moved. The list stayed behind. A list that does not grow with her is a souvenir, not a compass.
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The older version
 
The Qixi Festival in China dates to the Han dynasty, over 2,000 years ago. On the seventh night of the seventh lunar month, women wrote wishes on silk threads and offered them to two stars: Vega and Altair. The legend says those stars are separated lovers — the weaver Zhinu and the cowherd Niulang. They cross the Milky Way to meet one night a year.
The tradition traveled east. During the Heian period in Japan, 794 to 1185 CE, court nobles wrote waka poems and love prayers on leaves of the kaji tree. They hung them where the sky could see. By the Edo period, 1603 to 1868, ordinary people replaced the leaves with colored paper strips called tanzaku and tied them to bamboo. The festival is now called Tanabata.
In Korea, the same story became Chilseok. Families ate wheat-flour noodles and bathed in spring water on that night, trusting the date to carry their prayer forward.
Three countries. Three versions. Each one says the same thing: write what you want and put it somewhere you cannot take it back.
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What we’re seeing
 
Writing it down changes the odds.
Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University studied 267 people across six countries. Those who wrote their goals and shared weekly progress achieved them at nearly double the rate of those who kept goals in their heads. The numbers: 76 percent versus 43 percent.
Source: Matthews, Dominican University of California, 2015
Korea has written it down before engagements for 600 years.
In the Joseon dynasty, 1392 to 1897, the groom’s family sent a sajudanja to the bride’s family. The card listed his four birth pillars. A fortune teller compared the two before approving the match. The custom predates every dating app by centuries.
Source: Korean wedding customs; Joseon dynasty records
Murzello’s list story traveled across four shows in three countries.
After the 10-year relationship ended, she published “The Love List” in 2013. She appeared on NBC News, the Tamron Hall Show, the Today Show in Australia, and Good Morning Washington. The part of the story people shared was not the match. It was the rewrite.
Source: NBC News Better, 2018; Thrive Global
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What the universe is doing this week
 
The Harvest Moon arrives Saturday, September 26th, full in Pisces at 12:49 p.m. Eastern. This is the full moon closest to the autumn equinox, the one that gave farmers enough light to bring in the last of the crops.
Tonight the moon is waxing gibbous, two days from full, building toward Pisces. Venus is in Scorpio and approaching her retrograde on October 3rd. Mercury is direct and stays direct until October 24th.
A full moon in Pisces surfaces what you have been carrying without naming. Write the feeling down before Saturday. The Harvest Moon is for gathering what is ready.
Your next step:
Pull out the list. If you never wrote one, write it tonight. Then count: how many items describe what he looks like, and how many describe how you feel in the room with him? Rewrite the side that is short.
Remember, abundance is your birthright.